This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.
@robertorojasr offered a wonderful answer to Are newer developers pushed too exclusively towards web development?:
I think is about: market, ease and "coolness".
As far as I've seen the amount of jobs for webdev/mobile are orders of magnitude bigger than other fields, even desktop programs are now "Apps" written in Electron, nobody cares (for now) about performance, just the amount of LOC/day; the faster way is the web-way.
And that leads to the ease, you can learn enough HTML in an hour and another couple and you are good to go with CSS, is very easy to copy/paste and you can have something very pretty with very little effort, something that would impress in not much time, nobody cares if you optimized a DB query or solved a tough concurrency problem, you need years to make something awesome in C, and that leads to the third point.
Even that awesome thing you did in C will not be appreciated by 99,999999% of the population, you'll probably not make a lot of money either. You can make an embedded system that will save millions, increase production radically but probably nobody will see it, takes a special kind of person to work hard for no recognition nor money, just for the love of it, it also involves a lot more of work and learning, you'll certainly look better in a coffee shop with a MacBook than in a lab with an old Thinkpad, surrounded by oscilloscopes and smelling like soldering. You could solve the traveling salesman problem in log(n) and nobody would give a damn and the one solving it would be likely underpaid and working in a basement for not much, just because s(he) is having too much fun doing it.
And also other branches come from other disciplines, for data analysis you probably are an economist, physicist, astronomer, etc. Robotics you need a lot of electronics and some, mechanics; for other low level stuff you'll probably need the CS degree or a lot of extra dedication; webdev is more straight forward HTML -> CSS -> JS and stay in the front or add PHP/Python/Java/Ruby and go to the back and with the right framework you can skip the basics (I don't recommend it but you could). 6 months of webdev and you can probably start making money; not so fast in other "branches".
But of course depends heavily in each market, probably in China and South Korea they have more focus in other things.
And could be of course also a perception thing, in dev.to clearly the focus is more towards webdev, so more webdev people post here, and because there is more content about it even more people come; maybe is just what we are seeing; in Instructables and Hackaday they may wonder why nobody talks about webdev :)
@sorxrob shared a sweet achievement in What was your win this week?:
I've successfully launched an interactive 3D visualization of COVID-19 and it now has 100+ stars on github!
Here's the url: covid3d.live
Dev.to Post: dev.to/sorxrob/i-ve-open-sourced-a...
@yaser talked about their personal experience as it relates to this global pandemic in Are you coding more in your spare time due to COVID—19?:
I with my sis have been badly sick for a week or so, I thought it's the seasonal flu... been recovered and doing pretty well.
One week later, my father, mother, and aunt got sick but this time my aunt hardly breathed, took her to the hospital to find out we have Covid-19 at home!
Another week later after making them eat & rest well, they're all getting better and I feel the happiest person on earth that we passed this 😌
Realized after that small stuff like "having spare time to code" or "doing stuff you love" or even "breathing with no problem" are big blesses that we took for granted.
Stay safe and grateful for what you have ❤
@devpato hops in to the Describe the best manager you've ever had thread to share their experience:
Her name is Karyn. I worked with her at CSX the rail road company. She had very cool ideas in mind, she knew how to listen to her employees, she protected us when she knew things weren't fair, she wanted us to keep growing and learn new things, she was flexible, she was thoughtful. One of my favorite things about her was that she trusted her employees. She knew our talent and she knew we will get things done. Also, She was ready to help us when we needed help and she never crossed the line that make her seem like a micromanager. While I was at CSX, she tried to make things better not only for her employees but for everyone! and she was 100% pro diversity and inclusion and I'm thankful that she gave me the opportunity to be part of her team. I don't even work for her anymore and she reaches out here and there to see what's up with me. She is awesome and I miss working with her all the time. She is not a boss, she is a leader.
@giovaniandrade talked about their choice in response to What library/language/tool wowed you with its developer experience?:
Comment Not Found
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (2)
Congrats to @robertorojasr , @sorxrob , @yaser , @devpato , and @giovaniandrade for making the list this week!
Thanks a lot, Peter!